Just as everybody else I am trying to weave my story from different hues in multitude of threads within Indian culture and a plethora of needles held by its people.
A country has more special relationship than one enjoys with his ancestors. It lets you melt in the crowd within the bounds of a geography and flow with them to endlessly in thought and culture.
My birth year resounds with celebrated and scandalous events.

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Monday, August 20, 2012

Jadav Payeng The man who made a forest

jadav payeng : Extra ordinary of an ordinary man:

look at this man carefully. he is no ordinary man. he lives by the river in a small hut in kokilamukh, assam. this man will be addressing a UN convention in paris in less than two months from now. the convention will be chaired by some of the top notch environmentalists from across the world. a few years back president kalam sought an hour and a half to talk to him after giving him a president's medal. he is known as the forest man of india. he is jadav payeng aka mulai da

Jadav Payeng was a 16 year old teenage boy back then, he found those snakes and all of them were dead.

“The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms,” Payeng

“It was carnage. I alerted the forest department and asked them if they could grow trees there. They said nothing would grow there. Instead, they asked me to try growing bamboo. It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me,” he told in an interview recently.

However now the same area is a dense forest sprawling 1,360 acre. The forest boast of rich flora and fauna; it has some rare trees and many animals like rhino, elephants and tigers. He created this forest out of a barren land with his sheer hard work and focus. He has dedicated 30 years of his life (he still continues) to the upkeep of the forest. He is 47 now and lives in a hut in the midst of forest with his wife Binita and three children. He has a dairy farm next to his hut with cows and buffaloes and sell the milk for a livelihood. He had lost nearly 100 buffaloes and cows to tigers of the forest. Wild elephants have also damaged his house several times. However, Jadav Payeng is not feeling bad for it and says that the people who carry out large scale encroachment and destruction of forests are the root cause of the plight of wild animals, leading to the loss of their habitat and making them to prey on domestic animals.

A man in his mid-50s helped grow a huge forest on a sand bar in the middle of the mighty Brahmaputra in Assam's Jorhat district, which has caught attention of the government, tourists and film-makers.

The 30-year-long effort of Jadav Payeng, known among local people as 'Mulai', to grow the woods, stretching over an area of 550 hectares, has been hailed by the Assam Forest Department as 'examplary'.

Mulai began work on the forest in 1980 when the social forestry division of Golaghat district launched a scheme of tree plantation on 200 hectares at Aruna Chapori situated at a distance of five KMs from Kokilamukh in Jorhat district.

Assistant conservator of forest Gunin Saikia, who is presently posted at Sivsagar district, said, “Mulai was one of the labourers who worked in our project which was completed after five years. He chose to stay back after the completion of the project as others left."

Mulai not only looked after the plants, but continued to plant more trees on his own effort slowly transforming the area into a big forest, Saikia noted.

“This is perhaps the biggest forest in the middle of a river,” Saikia, who was instrumental in conceiving the project, said.

The department planned to launch another plantation programme in the area this year, Saikia said pointing out that there was ample scope to extend the forest by another 1,000 hectares.

Not only tourists are flocking to the woods in droves, a famous British film-maker Tom Robert went there two years back to shoot one of his films.

The forest, known in Assamese as 'Mulai Kathoni' or Mulai forest, houses around four tigers, three rhinoceros, over a hundred deer and rabbits besides apes and innumerable varieties of birds, including a large number of vultures.

It has several thousand trees among which are valcol, arjun, ejar, goldmohur, koroi, moj and himolu. There are bamboo trees too covering an area of over 300 hectares.

A herd of around 100 elephants regularly visits the forest every year and generally stay for around six months. They also gave birth to 10 calves in the forest in recent times.

Mulai’s efforts caught attention of the forest department only during 2008 when a team of forest officials went to the area in search of a herd of 115 elephants that sneaked into the forest after damaging property of villagers at Aruna chapori, around 1.5 km from the forest.

“The officials were surprised to see such a large and dense forest and since then the department is showing interest on conservation with regular visit to the site,” Mulai said.

Mulai, an avid nature lover, has constructed a small house in the vicinity of the reserve and stays with his family which comprises wife, two sons and a daughter.

He earns his living by selling milk of cows and buffalows he has kept. Mulai has one regret, though. The state government has so far not provided any financial assistance to him to carry out his 'mission' except for the Forest Department which from time to time supplies him saplings for plantation.

“A few years back, poachers tried to kill the rhinos staying in the forest but failed in their attempt due to Mulai who alerted department officials. Immediately our officials swung into action and seized various articles used by the poachers to trap the animals,” Atul Das, forest beat officer, said.

In the last three months Das along with a few of his staff are camping in the area to stave off any attempt by poachers to kill the rhinos.

“We are persuading the state government to initiate necessary measures with the Centre for declaring the area a mini wildlife sanctuary,” Pranon Kalita, leader of Jorhat district Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad, said.

Member of Parliament from Jorhat and former DoNER Minister B K Handique would also take up the matter with the concerned union ministry for declaring the area into a wildlife sanctuary, Kalita said.

Mulai said, “If the Forest Department promises me to manage the forest in a better way, I shall go to other places of the state to start a similar venture,” he said.

More than 30 years ago, a teenager named Jadav "Molai" Payeng began planting seeds along a barren sandbar near his birthplace in India's Assam region, the Asian Agereports.It was 1979 and floods had washed a great number of snakes onto the sandbar. When Payeng -- then only 16 -- found them, they had all died.

"The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms," Payeng told the Times Of India.

"It was carnage. I alerted the forest department and asked them if they could grow trees there. They said nothing would grow there. Instead, they asked me to try growing bamboo. It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me," he told the newspaper.

Now that once-barren sandbar is a sprawling 1,360 acre forest, home to several thousands of varieties of trees and an astounding diversity of wildlife -- including birds, deer, apes, rhino, elephants and even tigers.

The forest, aptly called the "Molai woods" after its creator's nickname, was single-handedly planted and cultivated by one man -- Payeng, who is now 47.

According to the Asian Age, Payeng has dedicated his life to the upkeep and growth of the forest. Accepting a life of isolation, he started living alone on the sandbar as a teenager -- spending his days tending the burgeoning plants.

Today, Payeng still lives in the forest. He shares a small hut with his wife and three children and makes a living selling cow and buffalo milk, OddityCentral.com reports.According to to the Assistant Conservator of Forests, Gunin Saikia, it is perhaps the world’s biggest forest in the middle of a river.

"We were surprised to find such a dense forest on the sandbar," Saikia told the Times Of India, adding that officials in the region only learned of Payeng's forest in 2008.

Finally, Payeng may get the help -- and recognition -- he deserves.

"[Locals] wanted to cut down the forest, but Payeng dared them to kill him instead. He treats the trees and animals like his own children. Seeing this, we, too, decided to pitch in," Saikia said.